Chain of Evidence

31

In the mid-north of South Australia, Jim Ely was thinking that the Bluff’s forefathers had chosen a well-drained site for the cemetery. On a gentle slope beyond the town’s stockyards, it was screened by several old gum trees and was an oddly silent place, especially today, a soft spring day, and a good day for digging a new grave.

Ely arrived just after lunch that Thursday, driving his rattletrap truck, a Massey Ferguson tractor on the back. The tractor came with a bucket on the front, and a backhoe, making it a useful piece of machinery for hire in the district. Ely was always in demand. He’d been digging graves for ten years, but he also contoured paddocks to protect against soil erosion, dug septic lines and carved out drains, dams and swimming pools. He’d known Ted Anderson: they’d gone to school together. He’d known Ted’s wife, even dating her a couple of times. With a heavy heart he parked the truck on clear ground near her grave and unloaded the tractor. The funeral was early the next morning, so today was Jim’s only opportunity to prepare the grave. The Catholic priest’s circuit took in several towns, and he was giving the service at two other funerals on Friday, eighty kilometres apart.

Galahs screeched from the trees, disturbed by the racket Jim was making. They wheeled pink and grey against the balmy sky and settled again as he worked.

The soil above Glenda Anderson’s coffin had settled in the five years since her death but soil once disturbed is easier to gouge out than soil compacted or baked hard since the beginning of time. Jim carved away. He knew that Glenda’s coffin was two metres down. He wouldn’t go that deep, of course, but leave a hand’s width of soil above her for her husband’s coffin.

The thing is, when Jim made his first swipe at the soil, going down about half a metre, and had swivelled around in the tractor and deposited that first load, and returned for his second, he spotted an anomaly in the loosened earth. He got down and crouched for a better look.

Heavy-duty black plastic, maybe a garbage bag. But the scoop’s steel teeth had gashed it open and a putrescent mass was oozing out. The stench was stupefying. Odd place, he thought, to bury offal or a dead pet. He didn’t want to think past that.

He climbed aboard the tractor again and manoeuvred the bucket carefully, deftly going in under the plastic and hoisting it out. Soil fell away. The whole oozing mass rolled like jelly.

He swung around and gently trundled to a far corner of the cemetery, where he deposited the putrid bag. Jim’s intention was clear: finish digging the grave, nice and tidy, ready for Ted’s coffin tomorrow morning, then rebury the rubbish somewhere else.

Still his mind wasn’t letting him make the obvious leap. That didn’t happen until the bag split open and slime-covered trousers and shoes emerged into the open air for the first time in several years.